Audiopile Review: Coming in hot off his very recent double pack of kinetic dance floor shakers, ISS010, and three years on from Pool, his manic post-IDM masterpiece, Skee Mask takes the time to stretch out and luxuriate with his newest full length, Resort. Befitting of its title, Resort is also his most varied album to date, subtly and sequentially shifting mood across its four sides, managing to touch back on his earlier works while forging on to explore new terrain. Building slowly, opening track “Hedwig Transformation Group” sets the scene with its pure shimmering ambience, its cooling and watery tone comes off as restorative. It bleeds into the utterly sublime “Nostaglitch”, which is fitted with dreamy SAW II-like melodies, a faint shuffling beat arriving at the closing moments to remind us who we’re dealing with. And when beats and breaks do emerge in full, Skee Mask is sure to soften their sharper edges. From the wavering ambient tones on “Reminiscrmx” or the pulsing dub atmospherics of “Waldmeister”, the push in BPMs is always accompanied by delicate melodies to help offset the propulsion. Eventually the record bursts to life, his now trademark breakbeat-fuelled IDM takes over the middle of the album, but the knotty twists and razor-sharp drums never quite consume in the same way as they did on Pool, his ultimate excerise in hyper-focused precision beatwork. Without loosening his grip on the album’s throbbing stride, the last leg of Resort is bathed in a dusky glow of twilight ambiance—“7am At The Rodeo” merges Rephlex-ian breakbeats with starry chords that sound lifted from Syro, while “Vitamin 313” ends off this epic ride of an album with a layer of footwork rhythms atop a sparkling bed of downtempo bliss. It’s getting harder to pinpoint Skee Mask’s finest full length, but a case can certainly be made for Resort. A year-end contender at the very least.

With an excellent and prolific clip of releases dropping throughout the 2020s, a new Skee Mask record could strike at any time and be just as enticing as the last. His latest LP for Ilian Tape since 2021’s Pool is no different. Resort features refreshing takes on the sounds and styles of his last few Ilian Skee EPs, from idyllic electro to electrified scrambling drum breaks. ‘Hedwig Transformation Group’ opens with fluid melody and aquatic atmospherics, continuing in that lush natural vein as ambient dub is peppered with skittering rhythms on ‘Nostaglitch’, meanwhile rubbery beats stretch and morph with flashes of dub synths on ‘Schneiders Paradox’.